Eleven months

I hate telling people that Adriana is eleven months old. Whenever I do they always remind me that she is nearly a year old (because, what? I might not have noticed?), and I'm not sure I'm ready for that.

I say that, and I do sort of miss Adriana being a tiny (tiny! ha!) baby, but I'm also finding that I love and will miss every stage she goes through. Right now, she is playing with us more and can communicate with us, to a certain extent, and is just a lot of fun. Which is what I say every month. I should probably just write, "My baby is growing up! So I am sad! But she is more fun to play with now and learning lots of things! Because that's what babies do!" And then I could copy and paste that every month and save us all some time.

That would be nice, but it's not what you'd expect from the woman with the 10,000-word birth story, now is it? So:

There are some days when I wonder if this is what eleven months is like, how on earth am I going to deal with a two-year-old? That's usually when Adriana is fussing to be picked up, and then fussing to get down as soon as she's up, and then arching her back and screaming when I put her back down. But then she takes a nap (we still get two a day out of her; ssshhhhhhh) and after an hour or so we are all much happier.

Right now Adriana seems to be between bouts of teething, and it's heavenly. We still aren't sleeping through the night, but I can handle waking up only once or twice. We've talked about the possibility of moving her to her own bed, or even her own room, but she does seem to sleep for longer spells when she's snuggled up with us, and I am content to have her warm, cuddly body beside me this winter. She still not a big eater, but now that there are a few things she'll eat regularly and she seems more willing to try the new things we offer, I feel okay about it. I know she's getting what she needs nutritionally from me, and that at this age "real food" just lets her experiment with different tastes and textures.

I am constantly forgetting how high she can reach. Things set near the edge of the kitchen table are easily within her reach, and I have been surprised at how far back things need to be. We have a couple of little poofs we bought in Spain that she climbs on top of to reach things on shelves that used to be safe from her little fingers; I'm in trouble when she figures out that the kitchen chairs can serve the same purpose. She is closer and closer to walking. Over Thanksgiving weekend she pushed herself to a stand for the first time without pulling up on anything. When I set her down on the floor, she stands for a second on her own, before slowly lowering herself the rest of the way to the ground. She "cruises" easily around the furniture, and when I am in the kitchen she often pulls up on my leg, and I walk around slowly as I do dishes or put away groceries so that she can "follow" me. I get a kick out of letting her hold one of my fingers while we walk, as if we are holding hands and going for a stroll. She giggles and shrieks with excitement as she takes her pigeon-toed bow-legged steps on her fat little feet. On Saturday she took her first unaided steps. Of course, she promptly fell over and has only done it twice more since.

She loves music, and will stand in front of the stereo bouncing in time with the music. Sometimes when a song ends, she applauds. She waves bye-bye when we say to, if she feels like it. She gives hugs to her stuffed monkey, her grandparents' dogs, other children her age, and would even hug the cat if the cat would tolerate it.

She is very much a mimic. I comb her hair after giving her a bath and then hand her the comb so she can try to comb it herself. If I give her the bottle of baby lotion to play with as I am rubbing the lotion into her skin, she tries to dab on more lotion from the closed bottle. Unless she is too busy trying to fit the bottle into her mouth---she is, after all, a baby. She watches the way we feed ourselves and tries to mimic with her own little spoon.

There was a song we used to sing at camp when I was little:
Late last night while we were all in bed
Old Lady Leary left the lantern in the shed
And when the cow kicked it over she winked her eye and said
"It's gonna be a hot time in the old town tonight."
Fire fire fire!
Water water water!
Jump, lady, jump!
Ahhhhhhhhh....splat!
Adriana likes to shriek and will copy us when we do so, so I sing the song to her and she copies me when I shriek at the end. Now when I just start singing the song she begins her shrieking. It's kind of cute. And also probably a trick I am going to regret encouraging. I should have just stuck with singing "ba ba ba" instead of "na na na" for the chorus of "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" so that she could "sing along" with me on that one. Well, live and learn.

Book review: The Latke Who Couldn't Stop Screaming

Lemony Snicket's The Latke Who Couldn't Stop Screaming: A Christmas Story is awesome. It made me laugh a lot. You should read it.

December in California

I still have the Washington Post set as my homepage, and I am still registered with a metro-area zipcode, so when I opened my browser the other day I saw that it was snowing in DC, and I was a little sad. I did love the (rare) snow that we got when we lived there. It wasn't until that afternoon when I took the baby to the park to play on the swings that I realized that it's probably best to not have snow days anymore.

Lesson learned

If you are heating milk to make yogurt and you smell something suspicious from the general direction of the baby, TURN OFF THE STOVE BEFORE YOU TAKE THE BABY TO THE OTHER ROOM FOR A DIAPER CHANGE. Because burnt milk smells bad. And also because when you hear the noise of the milk boiling over and come running out to the kitchen to turn off the burner with an undiapered baby on your hip? Well, let's just say that no good can come of that.

At yoga on Friday there were two new moms--one had a six-week-old baby, and the other was the mother to a three-week-old. I had my normal reaction to seeing little newborns--basically a longing for the days when Adriana was that wee and squooshy. Because, you know, what I really need around here is another baby.

But I was surprised by what hit me next: a very intense series of memories of how crazy I felt those first few weeks.

I remembered being in the hospital room alone with her the day we were going to go home. I carefully dressed her in the sleeper that was to be her going home outfit. Then, studying her as she lay in the bassinet, I panicked, afraid that she wasn't my baby. I quickly undressed her again, checking the name tags on her wrist, both her ankles, and her umbilical stump. And then I held her and cried because there was surely something wrong with me if I didn't recognize my own baby.

I remembered standing by myself in a dark room, looking out the window at dusk, while Brian held the baby in our bedroom. It was only a few days after we'd brought Adriana home from the hospital--she must have been a week old at the most--and I felt helpless and scared. I cried, wondering if I loved the baby enough, if I loved her too much, if I would be able to be her mother. I felt that Brian was handling being a new parent better than I was.

I remembered cradling her in my arms in the middle of the night and, seeing her eyes shining in the dark, having a sudden fear that she was possessed by demons. I bit my tongue and made a conscious effort to keep holding her, knowing that I wasn't being rational, and telling myself that the fact that I knew I wasn't being rational was a good sign. But I didn't tell anyone--not Brian, not my midwife, not my closest friends--about that moment for fear that someone would try to keep me from Adriana.

I remembered an intense fear that there was somebody in the house. I knew I was not being rational, but to reassure myself I checked closets and under the bed, the baby clutched tightly to me. For a couple of days I wouldn't leave the baby alone in a room by herself even for a moment because I was afraid that whoever was in the house would steal her away if given the chance. I clung once again to my knowledge that my fear was irrational, telling myself that reading Outside Over There as a child had somehow scarred my psyche.

I remembered my first day home alone with Adriana. I nursed her and changed her diaper and set her down in her little chair. I sat in front of her and looked at her wondering what to do next. She wasn't hungry, wet, or fussing--just awake and looking at me. Surely there was something else I was supposed to be doing. But I didn't know what it was, so I sat and cried.

Adriana was nursing as class ended on Friday, and then she needed her diaper changed, so we were the last to leave. As I was rolling up my yoga mat, the instructor and I talked about those early days and how sweet they are, and then I tentatively confessed a couple of my moments of postpartum panic, forcing myself to laugh them off. It felt good to finally say them out loud.

When baby isn't feeling well

1. Realize that baby is warm
2. Take temperature
3. Administer Tylenol, feel guilty for not noticing earlier that this might be why she was fussy, fret about whether to call doctor
4. Nurse baby
5. Rock baby to sleep
6. Try to set sleeping baby down
7. Immediately regret decision as baby fusses
8. Return to rocker with baby
9. Wish you'd left your book nearby
10. Wish you had a glass of water
11. Remained pinned to rocker with feverish baby
12. Baby wakes up and cries
13. Nurse baby
14. Change baby's diaper
15. Note that temperature is coming down
16. Try to put baby down so you can put in a load of laundry/pick up toys/check e-mail
17. Change your mind as baby screams
18. Rock baby
19. Nurse baby to sleep
20. Baby wakes up and cries
21. Realize that baby is warm again
22. Return to step 2 and repeat cycle several times over next seven to eight hours
23. Notice just before your spouse returns home and you will finally have back up that baby is feeling better and no one will believe how today went

Thanksgiving

Over breakfast in Albuquerque a couple of years ago, I told my colleagues that I was the anxious one in my marriage when it came to travel: I am the one worried about traffic and parking and security lines. I think others at the table were a little concerned about Brian when I said that because when we were doing site visits, if I wasn't sharing a cab to the airport with anyone else, I would usually up at National only a few minutes before our plane began to board.

Wednesday morning I was worried. Brian and I had considered driving down to South Pasadena for Thanksgiving, as Adriana had handled the drive fairly well when we went for Halloween. But the Christie mentioned something about 11 hours on I-5 on the Sunday after Thanksgiving, and I decided that we would fly, in spite of the airport crowds. So I packed Adriana's and my duffle bag on Tuesday night, and planned on leaving for the airport almost two full hours before our flight was scheduled to depart (it's about a 20-minute drive with no traffic). And you know what? There was no traffic. We found a parking spot immediately and were taken quickly to the airport by the parking shuttle. We walked directly to the front of the line to check in (no checking in from home when you are traveling with a "lap baby"). The short security line moved quickly. Our plane boarded and left on time, and there were enough empty seats that we had our own row. Flying the day before Thanksgiving? No problem. What was I worried about?

It was a nice trip down to see The In-laws. Wednesday night my sister-in-law made a cheesecake topped with fresh berries to celebrate my birthday, and there were even a few presents for me. I spent most of Thursday over at my sister-in-law's apartment where she baked bread and a pecan pie, I made two pumpkin pies and an apple pie, and we took turns chasing after the baby. I gave many thanks for her standing mixer. Brian loves this recipe for pumpkin chiffon mousse, which I've made only twice before, both times deeming it good but not worth the effort; with the standing mixer it was a piece of cake (er, pie). Dinner was fantastic and we spent time after dinner playing a fun game of Trivial Pursuit, in which we kept reminding each other that the copyright on the game was 1981--questions about the Soviet Union and sports records weren't exactly up to date.

We spent a good part of Friday at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. It wasn't Adriana's first art museum, since we did spend her first six months in the land of the free museums, but it was the first since she'd become mobile, so I was a little concerned about how she'd hold up, but she did fine: she nursed through the exhibit on Islamic art, slept through Southeast Asian, European, and Japanese art, and was up in time to enter the Dalí exhibit. She didn't last long in there, but I didn't really mind slipping out, as surrealism isn't really my favorite. I was glad to be able to enjoy the exhibit Japanese Prints: Word/Poem/Picture, especially several scrolls by Otagaki Rengetsu. I liked the simplicity of her drawings, the curves of the Japanese characters, and the translations of her poetry:

"Through fields and mountains the autumn moon follows me on my joyful way home as if to send me to bed."

Saturday we headed back home. The Burbank airport was virtually empty, and there was again plenty of room on our plane. We found our car, in spite of the fact that we didn't take the little card with us and didn't know the name of the lot. "No, I think our shuttle is yellow," I told Brian as we wandered outside at San Jose and he pointed to a blue van. Luckily a white van with yellow and black lettering pulled up just behind the blue one and it took us to the right lot, with Brian teasing me the whole way about how all I knew about where we'd left our car was "yellow." I don't know what he was so worried about; it was obviously plenty.

After a couple of hours at home we headed back out, to see my friend Lynn, who was at her parents' house for Thanksgiving. It was fantastic to see her and her husband. She's expecting her first baby in April (a girl!), and I was a little envious of her belly, but it was fun to talk baby stuff and catch up.

And to round out a perfect holiday weekend, Adriana slept for nearly six hours straight when we got home. What more could I want?

29

Today is my birthday.

Seven songs

First, anyone else ever realize that you've been up for two hours and all you've eaten is a brownie and you go into the kitchen to get something healthy and end up eating another brownie? Gah! Why do I bake when I know I'll just eat what I bake constantly until it's gone?

Okay, seven songs I'm into right now, courtesy of Mary.

"St. Peter's Bones" by Girlyman: I am totally in love with Girlyman's harmonies

"Do You Remember?" by Jack Johnson: This somehow reminds me of when Brian and I first started dating

"After Party" by Ozomatli: With such profound lyrics like "Oye, baby! Oye, mami! Donde esta la after party?" this band is clearly destined for greatness

"Subterranean Homesick Blues" by Bob Dylan: So fun to try to sing along to

"Cease Fire" by Sarah Lee Guthrie and Johnny Irions: I don't know what it is about this song, but I can listen to it over and over all day long

"36-24-36" by The Violent Femmes: Another one that's fun to sing along to

"Born at the Right Time" by Paul Simon: Perhaps my all-time favorite Paul Simon tune

I wasn't going to do the bit where I tagged others to do this, but then it occurred to me that I am curious about what folks are listening to. So, Caitlin, Lauren, Ruthie, Anna, Jewel, Christie, and Eleeza, you are it!

Why is it that when I do stupid things I feel compelled to tell the internet about it?

Just as I was getting into bed, Adriana woke up. As I nursed her back to sleep, I realized that she needed a diaper change. I went into the other room and got everything ready (double thick diaper, plenty of toys to keep handing her in order to keep Her Wiggliness on her back long enough to get her cleaned up), and then returned to the bedroom for the baby, who miraculously kept her eyes closed and stayed calm and cooperative throughout the change. I sat in the dark, rocking her until she was completely asleep again. Once I had her in her bed, I went to start a load of diapers. Sure, it was eleven at night, but there were only two left, and we needed to leave early in the morning, so it made sense to get them going now.

And then the good luck that kept the baby asleep while I changed her ran out.

As I began to pour the detergent into the cap, I couldn't see it coming out. So I tipped the bottle further. And felt detergent run all over my arm and splash onto my bare foot. Aha! Because I hadn't wanted to disturb Brian's sleep, I hadn't turned on the light (which I guess I thought would be more disturbing than the sound of the washer running right outside our bedroom door). I couldn't see the detergent coming out of the bottle not because it wasn't happening, but because it was dark. Very clever of me to figure that out, don't you think? Well, I do have a master's degree.

Now I need to figure out how to keep the detergent from ruining my carpet. I mean, I wiped it up as best I could, but I don't think that's enough. The internets tell me that I may be in need of a carpet shampooer. Guess what I'll be doing this weekend!

On the first day of sixth grade, back in 1989, I sat down across the table from a pretty girl with brown hair in Mrs. Sanchez's social studies class. If someone had told me that eighteen years later we'd be spending an afternoon together playing with our kids, I don't think I would have believed them.


Why yes, the baby is sitting in a doll stroller with a wheel falling off. Perhaps letting the five-year-old do the assembly wasn't the best idea?

Time for cheer

A few years ago I was in Chicago for work in early November. As our taxi from Midway approached the hotel and we saw the Christmas decorations up in the windows at Marshall Fields, my boss said happily, "I love Christmas decorations." Which probably wouldn't have stuck in my head if it weren't for the fact that she was Jewish.

And I have to agree with her. I know some people are appalled at how early the Christmas marketing seems to come, but I have to admit I find it kind of exciting. I mean, seeing the Christmas section at Macy's back in September was a little strange, but I love the season. Yes, it's commercialized and the "real meaning" of the season sort of gets lost in the madness of it all, but it's still fun. There are goodies to bake, presents to wrap, secrets to keep, songs to sing. There are get togethers with friends and family. Halloween is over, the cooler weather seems to be here, and I am ready for one of my favorite times of year. (Okay, so by the time February rolls around, I'll be calling spring my favorite, I'm sure; although I just remembered that now that we're back in Calfornia, so February won't be a big horrible mess of "freezing rain" and "wintry mix," which is what an angry, vindictive god gives west coast kids who think that east coast winter precipitation is only lovely, fluffy snow. Not that I'm bitter.)

Anyhow, this is just to say that last week I came into possession of a Baby's First Christmas ornament. And that a cute little red Christmas dress that I've been wanting for the baby went on sale, so I had no choice but to purchase it. And that I started Christmas shopping. And it was all quite fun and exciting.

But I'll probably be tired of hearing "Winter Wonderland" by the end of November.

Ten months

Time goes so fast when you have a baby. I am pretty sure that just last week I was sent home from the hospital with a new born, and now it's like we have a little person around here. I mean, sure, she's a little person who poops her pants and can't get to sleep without help and whose audible communication skills are fussing, crying, and shrieking, with the occasional raspberry and "ba ba ba" thrown in, but still, she is noticeably moving from baby toward toddler.

Not that she is a toddler yet. In spite of dire predictions from various family members, Adriana is not yet walking. She cruises quite well these days, but still prefers to crawl if she wants to move quickly. I'm actually sort of excited for her to start walking. Yes, I know that comment is going to come back to bite me at some point, but I just think that if she's going to be mobile it would be easier, especially when we're out and about, if she were up on two feet instead of crawling.

Adriana is more fun to play with every day. She puts blocks into a box now, instead of just dumping them out. We have a stuffed monkey that she hugs and pats (and sits on and waves around). If you sing "If You're Happy and You Know It" she claps her hands, although not at the right time. She likes to chase and be chased, although it seems funny to call a version of the game that moves so slowly "chase." She likes the swings at the playground, and splashing around in the bathtub. She sits still for stories sometimes, and seems to particularly like the books we have with photographs of babies and children.

She is finally seeming to enjoy food a bit more. She never eats very much, but she is willing to try, and that is progress enough for me. In the mornings, she and I share a bowl of oatmeal. At lunch we usually have some yogurt with fruit and flaxseed. Snacks are Cheerios and slices of fruit that she feeds herself, or sometimes we feed each other. At dinner time, Brian and I feed her from our plates. The other night she ate lentil soup with great gusto and I wondered if the main problem with all the food I'd been offering in the past few months had been the lack of cumin, but the next night when we had leftovers she barely ate any at all, so I once again have no idea.

We go back and forth with sleep. For a few days last week, she was waking up too often at night, and I was exhausted. When she woke up "only" five times one night I felt refreshed--after all, that was better than waking up eight times--but that feeling was short lived. The past few nights she seems to be sleeping a little better, and both nights there has been a four-hour stretch that is absolutely heavenly. I know there are going to be good spells and bad spells. The problem is that when we are having bad spells I am too exhausted to try to fix things, and once we get through the bad spells, I think that things are going well and there's no need to worry.

These days, my favorite parts of the week are our yoga classes. The best one is the Friday morning one, which isn't as well-attended as the others. Adriana is usually the oldest baby there. She plays with the other crawlers, and investigates the smaller babies. And on Wednesdays when there are often older children there, she watches the toddlers with great interest and follows them around the room (usually picking up the Cheerios they drop behind them). She climbs on me as I do sun salutations, and cuddles up to nurse during the relaxation time at the end. Unless she curls up to nurse with me while the rest of the class does sun salutations and climbs on me (or one of the other moms) during the relaxation at the end, which isn't too bad either.

In orbit

I was moving laundry from the washer to the dryer when Adriana pulled up on my jeans and hugged me around my leg, grinning up at me.

"What's it like to be the center of her universe?" Brian asked, joking, as I loosened her grip so I could move without knocking her over, just as I do many times every day now that she has discovered that my jeans are great for pulling up on.

"A little stressful, and mostly wonderful," I told him honestly.

But after he asked, I started to think: right now, yes, I am the center of her universe, but she is also the center of mine, and I think that's exactly how it's supposed to be right now.

Courtesy of Helen and Sami

Brian came home from work and asked if we had any beer. I checked the fridge. No beer, but there was a bottle of sparkling wine that had been brought to our housewarming party back in August. So we had left over lentil soup and champagne for dinner.

And we lived happily ever after.

Halloween

When I first met Brian I didn't understand his deep true love for Halloween. I mean, I love candy and playing dress-up as much as the next kid, but is it really a holiday one must celebrate with family?

Well, it turns out that if you come from a neighborhood that gets exponentially more trick-or-treaters than I've ever seen in my life, you certainly do. I mean, you don't even worry about having people ring your doorbell in this neighborhood: you just sit out on the front porch and people form a line that reaches down to the street.



That graph right there shows that my in-laws provided candy to 1,715 trick-or-treaters last Wednesday, just slightly more than last year. So Brian, Adriana, and I spent all of last week in South Pasadena, where we decked out the front yard with ugly ghouls strung across the lawn on fishing line, fun jack-o-lanterns, and Herman, the dummy who is dropped on unsuspecting little beggars as they made their way up the the driveway.

Herman, hanging in the trees:


The ugliest Halloween decoration ever:


Pumpkins (I did the witch):







And now, what I know you've all been waiting for, my favorite squooshy monkey:

The Music of the Universe

From Isabel Allende's Paula:

Celia was walking back and forth, leaning on Nicolás, never losing her calm, taking short breaths when she doubled over with pain, and resting when the small being in her womb gave her a brief respite. My daughter-in-law carries in her veins secret songs that mark the rhythm of her steps as she walks; during the contractions, she panted and rocked back and forth as if listening to an irresistible, internal Venezuelan drumbeat. Toward the end, I thought that occasionally she made fists of her hands and a flash of terror passed through her eyes, but immediately her husband make her look straight at him, and whispered something in the private code of husband and wife, and her tension eased. . . .

By midafternoon, Celia made a sign; Nicolás helped her climb onto the bed and in less than a minute the apparatus and instruments the midwife carried in her station wagon materialized in the room. That girl in shorts seemed suddenly to mature; her tone of voice changed and millennia of female experience were reflected in her freckled face. "Wash your hands and be ready," she told me with a wink. "Now it's your turn to work." Celia put her arms around her husband, gritted her teeth, and pushed. And then, on a surging wave of blood, emerged a flattened, purplish face and a head covered with dark hair, which I held like a chalice with one hand while with the other I quickly unlooped the bluish cord wrapped around the baby's neck. With another brutal push from the mother, the rest of my granddaughter's body appeared, a blood-washed, fragile package: a most extraordinary gift. With a primeval sob, I felt in the core of my being the sacred experience of birth--the effort, the pain, the panic--and, gratefully, I marveled at my daughter-in-law's heroic courage and the prodigy of her solid body and noble spirit, designed for motherhood. Through a veil, I seemed to see a rapturous Nicolás, who took the baby from my hands and placed her on her mother's belly. Celia rose up from among her pillows, panting, dripping with sweat, transformed by inner light and, completely indifferent to the remainder of her body, which continued contracting and bleeding, she folded her arms about her daughter and welcomed her with a waterfall of words in a newly coined language, kissing and nuzzling her as every mammalian mother does, then offered the baby her breast in the most ancient gesture of humankind. Time congealed in the room, and the sun stopped above the roses on the terrace; the world was holding its breath to celebrate the miracle of that new life.

Orchids at the Huntington

Overheard in Beverly Hills

Man on cell phone: So do you want to have sex with me, or do you want to marry me? . . . Both?

384 days until I turn 30

Last night, I had a glass of white wine, several garlic bread twists, two slices of pizza, a glass of red wine, a couple of seven-layer bars, a brownie, a slice of kahlua cream pie, four peanut butter cups, two miniature Milky Ways, and a cup of hot chocolate. That night I had a stomachache. This must be one of the downsides of getting older. I would swear I was able to eat like that not too long ago.

Must go eat through a nice green leaf now.